The move toward high-contrast lighting coincided with a general move toward image sharpness and depth relative to the shallow focus and diffusion prevalent in the 1970s, and consequently is one of a number of closely connected tech-niques in New Hollywood cinematography. This is not to suggest that diffusion uniformly fell out of favor, but rather to assert that using highly diffuse images tended to be reserved for very particular purposes.
Increasing film stock speed facilitated depth and low-key lighting. Kodak introduced several new film stocks over the period, and cinematographers vig-orously debated their merits in the pages of American Cinematographer, some welcoming the faster speeds (that is, their increased sensitivity to light), oth-ers worrying about gains and losses in grain. Eventually, Kodak introduced an entirely new line in 1996 and 1997, the Vision color negative stocks. Though the pre-Vision stocks 5248 and 5293 continued to be used for day exteriors, Vision 5274 became a more common choice for interior filming, and Vision 5279 quickly became popular for its sensitivity in night exteriors on films like 1997’s Batman
& Robin (Schumacher, 1997, d.p. Stephen Goldblatt), and in night interiors on films like Snake Eyes (De Palma, 1998, d.p. Stephen Burum). The lack of grain proved to be of particular value for cinematographers in this period, though some found it too high contrast. Ed Lachman, speaking of his work on The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999), argued, “A lot of people have been questioning the Vision stocks because they think they’re too contrasty, but I think it’s just how you use them. I generally light with big, soft sources, so I welcome the contrast, but I suppose it would be more unforgiving for someone who uses harder light.”24
The preference for minimal-grain film stocks in the 1980s and afterward stands in contrast to the emphatic graininess of so much 1970s cinematography.
Cinematographers in that decade had explored the visual potential of film grain, especially as an aspect of realism, and had worked to bring that grain out by underexposing and then “pushing” (overdeveloping) the negative. Others, mean-while, had explored the potential of a high degree of image diffusion, not only through filtration but also such techniques as “flashing” the film, preexposing
2: The pictorialism of Charles Rosher’s cool-warm color contrast in The Yearling (1946).
4: Dense, exaggerated shadows produced by low-angle lighting in Bigger Than Life (1956).
6: A washed-out color palette for a scene in Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
8: The underexposed, “pushed” look of The Godfather (1972).
10: Capturing the light of a specific time of day in Days of Heaven (1978).
12: A desaturated, noir composition accented with vivid reds in Se7en (1995).
14: A digitally re-created Technicolor palette contributes to the period look of The Aviator (2004).
16: A low-light effect allowing the nighttime cityscape to be visible in the background in Collateral (2004).
it prior to photography to soften the black areas. The predominant trend in the New Hollywood, especially on studio films, was toward sharp, clean, grain-free images. Douglas Slocombe spoke of this as a stylistic goal of all the Indiana Jones films, particularly considering the practice of limited releases on 70mm for the biggest commercial pictures.25 Later, director David Fincher consistently opted for a fine-grain look, with Alex Thomson overexposing and then printing down for rich blacks and very little grain on Alien 3 (1992).26
Where grain was desired, though, it was pursued aggressively, and through a variety of often unconventional devices, as for instance in selecting alternatives to prevalent film stocks. On Clockers (1995), first-time cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed talked Spike Lee into going for an unusual Kodak reversal stock, 5239, which had never been produced in bulk. The reversal stock, originally designed to produce positive images without the negative stage, had a particu-larly raw grain structure, but also gave “intense, vivid colors.”27
Sayeed’s work on Clockers was inspired, in part, by the remarkable exper-iments of Robert Richardson. It’s hard to think of another period in which a cinematographer whose work is as idiosyncratic, as flagrantly experimental, and as virtuosic to the point of being exhibitionistic as Richardson’s could thrive.
Though he later proved to be a perfect match for Scorsese, his work for Oliver Stone in particular established his credentials as a virtuoso. In JFK (1991), Nat-ural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995), a variety of film stocks and video formats were used in conscious juxtapositions as a means of creating meaning through contrasts in texture and emotional tone. As an American Cinematogra-pher article on Natural Born Killers explained:
In crafting the film’s garish, eye-popping psychological mindscapes, Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson, ASC, combined a wide variety of shooting formats (color and black & white 35mm, black & white 16mm, Super 8, Hi8 and Beta), with front- and rear-projection photog-raphy, bits of heavy-metal animation, stock footage and clips from other films, including several of Stone’s previous projects.28
As this description indicates, cinematographic style in Natural Born Killers was driven by ambitions well above and beyond storytelling, at once commenting on a media-saturated society (the stylistic shifts intended to mimic channel-surfing in the film’s tale of media celebrity killers), and creating a “radical,” “halluci-nogenic” style to mimic the central characters’ subjective experience (see figure 5.3).29 The aims that the filmmakers invoked for this were less those of the Hol-lywood paradigm and more those of modernist art movements, the shifting perspectives on the action created by this collage-like style forming the basis of comparisons to cubism and surrealism.30 Stone and Richardson refined this aesthetic further on their next collaboration, Nixon, mixing conventional
35mm footage with material shot using a variety of other cameras, including a
“1970s-model Ikegami” and “antiquated, cumbersome tube cameras” from the 1950s.31 Far from invisibility or illusionism, this was style that had to be noticed as such to achieve its intended effect.